You know, for the most part, I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the designs of the A-lamp “replacement” LED lamps. I’m not shooting my mouth off saying I have a much better design, but there is something about that diffused white globe atop the heat sink, which looks like a handful of fins. I actually kinda like the heat sink design, the fins are neat. If you’ve held one of those suckers when it’s been on for a while, that heat sink is HOT! Not Jennifer Lopez hot, we’re talking George Bush’s ears while telling the nation that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction hot. That is HOT!

I just turned onto a new design for the LED A-lamp from a company called the Switch Bulb Company – they are promoting an LED replacement A-lamp with a high CRI, a warm feel, and a pretty decent output. The difference? A lens-type “ball” atop the heat sink that shows each element and the heat dissipation gear inside. It’s actually quite a beautiful design! Check it out:

Pretty interesting design, huh! Switch is offering three models right now – the Switch40, Switch60 (PDF spec link), and Switch75 (PDF spec link). As you can probably guess, these 40, 60, 75 ratings are the replacement quantity of light per power consumption hint-hint to sell the “incandescent replacement” idea. The Switch40 doesn’t have specifications online yet, but the Switch60 claims 830 lumens at 13 watts, and the Switch75 claims 1150 lumens at 16 watts. Pretty decent! That 830 lumens figure is pretty close to an 850 lumen incandescent at 60 watts in terms of efficacy – if you look at an 850 lumen 60W incandescent, the efficacy is about 14.2 lm/W, but the Switch lamp is putting out nearly the same output at 13W, giving a near 64% efficacy!

Switch is showing two general colors – a “warm” at around 2750 Kelvin, and a “Neutral” colored lamp, more than likely a bit higher in color temperature. I’ve requested to get my hands on one of these, let’s see if that happens or not! I would love to see one up close!